He's on a multicity tour for his first book, The Dangerous Animals Club, a book of stories from his life, some having to do with his gazillions of appearances on TV and in films, some not. The stories also have a podcast life, as part of his The Tobolowsky Files(coming soon to an NPR station near you).

Before today's talk, he said being on a book tour is "like being on the anvil of the sun in Lawrence of Arabia" (meaning the crossing of the Nafud Desert in the film, a journey thought to be suicidal). "You never get to sleep." He seemed in a fine mood, though, exuberantly greeting the many friends who showed up from his time at SMU, including local comedian-comedy writer Jill Peters, who directed his then-girlfriend Beth Henley's first play at the school (Henley went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Crimes of the Heart). Tobolowsky, or Tobo as his buddies call him, also got support from his wife, Ann, father, brother, sister and other family members at the casual shindig.

He told a couple of Dallas-based stories having to do with creativity and his curiosity about the "first light" mentioned in Genesis. It couldn't have been the sun, because God didn't create that till the fourth day -- a contradiction that at first bothered him. He's now decided that the "light" is "the blinding spark of creativity, inspiration, the thing that makes us human."

In the first story, he recounted his days in Texas-history class with Mrs. Norton at Jefferson Davis Elementary (now Barbara Jordan Elementary), assigned to do a report on Moses Austin, the father of Stephen F. Austin. "The only thing I knew about Moses Austin in the fourth grade was that he wasn't in the World Book, which meant I was done for," Tobolowsky recalled. He decided to just make it up, drawing on his mother's life for inspiration. So, in his version, Moses Austin led 200 settlers to Texas from the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre area of Pennsylvania (where his mother grew up). As the time for his little speech drew near, he decided to make it 10,000 settlers. "If I'd had more time, it might have been another Moses altogether," he said. "Let my people go ... to Waxahachie!"

Tobolowsky also told a harrowing, but hilarious, tale about "the most creative day of my life," when he was, at 25, held hostage during a robbery at the Safeway in Snider Plaza. Perusing an exotic display of mangoes, he was surprised when a stranger "put his hand on the front of my grocery cart. Now, that was just wrong. I was raised in Texas, where a man's grocery cart is sacrosanct. That was like touching someone's belt buckle -- you didn't do it without invitation."

"I see you have mangoes, the most exotic of fruits," the man mumbled to Tobo, and then he began to cry. Then he put a .45 to Tobo's forehead. As they stood there, Tobolowsky remembered an episode of a Chad Everett medical drama where Chad advised that in a hostage situation, you should keep the gunman talking. "I didn't know what to get him talking about, so I kept talking," Tobolowsky said, "faster than a racehorse on Mexican television." All the while, he could see a SWAT team, news anchors, a helicopter and an ambulance assembling outside the store. "The ambulance opened and they brought out a gurney and a body bag. I knew one was for him and one was for me."

A firm voice in his head told him to do something, anything, but something different. So Tobolowsky did the only logical thing: He invited the gunman to his house for dinner, scribbled his (real) McFarlin Avenue address on a piece of brown paper from the mango bin, then told him he really had to get going. He maneuvered the cart around toward the door, felt the gun move to the back of his head, and just kept walking. The inner voice assured him that if he could make it past the Pepsi display at the end of the aisle, he'd be fine. And he was.

"Between the mangoes and the invitation to dinner, the light I was looking for was somewhere beyond the Pepsi aisle." And that, my friends, is pure philosophical inspiration.

The Friends of the SMU Libraries have two more author events this fall: Nonfiction superstar Susan Orlean on Oct. 10 and best-selling thriller novelist Justin Cronin on Nov. 2. Both events are free, and information can be found here.